BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. 

I don’t open my eyes yet. Opening my eyes is a commitment and I’m not ready for commitments at 6:00 in the morning. Instead, I take inventory, the way that out-of-state doctor taught me to. Fingers? Swollen but functional. Knees? Jury’s still deliberating. Stomach? Already angry about something unknowable. Lower back? Screaming, but that’s just my spine paying rent in pain. 

The dog is awake before me, which is a contest he absolutely invented and is very proud of himself for winning. He breathes at me from atop the bed, loud and deliberate, a furry hostage negotiator. I know you’re awake! Get up and let me outside! One of the cats materializes out of thin air, curling up on my chest and purring with the entitlement of a creature who has never once doubted its right to exist. 

Must be nice.

I reach for my phone. There are eleven notifications which include an email from my co-author and two from my editor (thrice the "per my last email" energy). A couple Discord pings. A Google Calendar reminder that just says TAXES, which feels like a threat. A text from my mother-in-law about family dinner tomorrow. I put the phone down. I'll deal with all of that when I'm vertical.

Getting vertical, however, is a negotiation. I swing my legs over and wait for the head rush. I have POTS, which means my blood has no idea how gravity works, which means standing up is an athletic event for me. The head rush is in full pep-rally mode today so I wait longer than usual. The dog sets his chin on my knee like he's timing me.

"Yeah, buddy. I'm comin'. Workin' on it."

I shuffle forward and stretch, feeling pain sour every molecule in my body. Four more cats emerge from various hiding spots like a furry flash mob, all acting like they haven't eaten in six days despite the fact that I filled their bowls less than nine hours ago.

"You're all liars," I tell them. But I fill the bowls anyway.

While I get dressed, I think about the lists. The To-Do List and the Proof-I-Deserve-to-Live List and the Already-Done List and the What the Hell? List. 

The What-Am-I? List. 

I am… the CEO of Radical Resilience, LLC. I am a multi-genre novelist with twelve published books and five more in various stages of completion (which sounds like a metaphor but is actually just my life). I am a lyricist with over 150 songs on streaming platforms. I am a freelance journalist covering Central Utah. I am the founding chapter president of the first League of Utah Writers chapter in my county. I am the incoming Chairperson of a public health coalition fighting crises in my community. I am the new Newsletter Editor for the Henderson Writers Group. I volunteered to be on the committee for two upcoming LUW conferences. I am the raffle chairperson for the Las Vegas Writers Conference 2027, where I was also faculty this year at twenty-nine years old. I volunteered for 3 twelve-hour shifts at FanX registration and 5 eight-hour shifts at Author Nation. And I picked up another volunteer commitment this week because apparently my calendar had a two-hour gap on the eighteenth and my nervous system interpreted that as a moral failing.

I am also a mother. A wife. A pet owner (six cats and a dog who thinks he's my emotional support human). I am autistic and have ADHD on top of the POTS and hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos and gastroparesis and roughly fifteen other co-morbid diagnoses that make existing most days a genuine physical achievement.

I go to therapy every week. I take my meds. I do the work.

And I still feel like it's not enough.

There is a light on my dashboard that never turns off. It says YOU HAVEN’T EARNED IT. It stayed lit the day my book hit number one on Amazon. It stayed lit the day I stood alongside New York Times bestselling authors and taught a room full of people something real. 

The light has never, on my best day, so much as even flickered. I don’t know what it’d be like if that alarm… just turned off. 

I used to think this was a motivation problem. Like if I just worked harder, produced more, volunteered for one more thing, the light would finally click off and I'd be allowed to rest. But I've learned enough about my own brain now to know that's a lie my nervous system tells me.

The light is wired to the belonging circuit. And belonging and accomplishment are completely different systems.

When you grow up in an environment where love is conditional (where your existence is treated as a burden by the people who were supposed to make you feel safe), your brain writes a rule before you're old enough to speak. The rule is simple: My existence is insufficient to make someone stay.

Carl Rogers called it conditional positive regard. An environment where acceptance depends on performance. The thing about learning that rule as a toddler is that I learned it before my prefrontal cortex was developed enough to question it. It was encoded the same way flinching was encoded. I don't decide to flinch. My body just does it. I don't decide to feel insufficient. My body just does that too.

There's a fourth trauma response beyond fight, flight, and freeze. Therapist Pete Walker coined it the fawn response. Fawning is what happens when your brain decides the safest way to neutralize a threat is to become so accommodating, so useful, so completely indispensable that the threat can't afford to throw you away. It's a survival strategy operating below conscious awareness. Your body moves toward appeasement before your conscious mind has even registered the threat.

For me, the fawn response looks like hyper-competence. Twelve published books. 150 songs. A writers group built from scratch. A coalition. Volunteering for everything simultaneously. And then, when a friend texts me to say he thinks I need to learn to say no, I reply I think you're right while already scrolling through my calendar for the next gap to fill.

From the outside, it looks like ambition. From the inside, it is a nonstop campaign to be so useful that everyone in my life (my husband, my friends, my community, the whole damn universe) would lose something tangible by discarding me.

I love my husband. He is the most fundamentally good human being I have ever met. He has never once actually asked me to earn him. He tells me to stop overreaching. He literally begs me to rest.

And I am still, on some level, performing for him. Because my nervous system is convinced that if I stop... if he sees me with no manuscripts open and no committees to chair and no clients to invoice... if he sees me just existing on the bed in my pajamas being nothing... he will finally see what's underneath the mask. And what's underneath is a mess. An emotional, overreacting, annoying, autistic, too-much, insecure, unlovable mess.

I can hear you from here. You're thinking: Mariah, that's not true. I know. I can name the cognitive distortion. My therapist and I have labeled it, categorized it, and filed it in the correct neurological drawer. But naming a thing and believing the concept are different skills. 

I know my programming is broken. That doesn’t stop the programs from running.

When achievement is driven by a trauma-wired nervous system, accomplishment registers as threat averted instead of joy arrived. Relief, briefly. Then the scanner starts up again. My brain has a smoke detector that goes off for house fires and cooking toast with equal enthusiasm. Every achievement is just me waving a towel at the detector, buying myself thirty seconds of silence before it starts screaming again.

Let me tell you about the rest of this particular day.

I make coffee. I take my meds after forcing down applesauce because my gastroparesis means eating is a negotiation and sometimes the negotiation fails. There's a blue pill for the things my body does and two white ones for the things my brain does and one that's supposed to prevent my night terrors (but doesn’t so far).

I drive my husband to work because we have one car. On the return trip I call a friend and we talk about burnout and whether it's possible to be both ambitious and exhausted, and she says "absolutely, that's just a weekday" and I laugh so hard I almost pee.

By eight, I'm home. A cat has knocked over the coffee I left on the counter. Classic. I make more coffee and sit at my desk (appropriately dubbed my Command Center). I open seven tabs: chapter revision, client manuscript, article draft, invoice, calendar, email, and a blank Google Doc I keep open because sometimes I need to scream into a void that auto-saves.

I write 4,000 words about a water district meeting that would bore most people to death but secretly contains enough small-town political intrigue to fuel a limited series. I am good at this part. Finding the story inside the thing nobody wants to look at.

By noon, my back is done. I move from the desk to the bed. The dog follows and a pair of cats appears. I switch to editing my sci-fi manuscript and spend forty-five minutes on a single paragraph. I change a word, change it back, consult the thesaurus, change the word again. I stare at it until the letters stop looking like real language.

This is the work. The staring. The revising. The proving.

Therapy begins at 1:30. My therapist asks how I'm managing stress and I say "I'm not" with a smile. We talk about earned secure attachment. The research says adults who had insecure attachment in childhood can develop secure attachment in adulthood through therapy, healthy relationships, and reflective work. Neural networks can be rewired through new, repeated, emotionally significant relational experiences.

The rewiring is happening within me. I believe that. But it is happening while I stand on a shaky foundation.

I pick my husband up at five. He asks if I ate lunch and I say "define lunch" and he gives me the look (the one that means he loves me and is also gently annoyed at my complete disregard for my own nutrition). 

Dinner is mashed potatoes and chicken. Twenty minutes later, throwing up is mashed potatoes and chicken.

By evening, I'm running a D&D session on Discord. I do voices. I roll dice. I feel that special joy I get from collaborative storytelling, which is different from the joy of solitary writing, which is different from the joy of journalism. 

I have a lot of joys. They are all exhausting.

The most exhausting joy I have? Being myself. My autism gives me the pattern recognition that makes me a good journalist. My hyperfocus lets me write for four to eight hours a day and find it fascinating. My systematic thinking that lets me build organizations from scratch. 

My brain is a spectacular machine, I’ve realized. 

But this world was built for someone else's brain. Every social interaction requires computation that neurotypical people run automatically. For me, masking is awful: forcing eye contact, memorizing social scripts, actively monitoring my tone, suppressing the impulse to stim. Autistic burnout is what happens when the cumulative demands of pretending to be neurotypical exceed my capacity to sustain it.

Now layer the fawn response on top of the masking. I am performing social normalcy to avoid awkwardness while simultaneously performing indispensability to avoid abandonment. Two full-time survival jobs running at once inside a body with fifteen co-morbid diagnoses that make breathing an achievement.

The world looks at me and sees someone who is doing a lot. And I look at me and see someone who should be doing more.

At ten o'clock, the house is quiet except. I can't explain to anyone what the silence feels like. When I am still, I am exposed. Rest registers as vulnerability. 

Work is the drug. Productivity is the hit. And the withdrawal symptom is a toddler's voice in the back of my skull whispering that I am about to be discarded.

Naomi Eisenberger proved in 2003 that social exclusion activates the same brain regions that process physical pain. Rejection literally hurts. And for someone whose first experience of rejection came from the two people biologically obligated to keep her, that pain system is permanently miscalibrated. My mental smoke detector goes off when the kitchen is empty. It goes off when everything is fine. It goes off when I'm lying in bed next to a man who loves me and has never once asked me to be anything other than myself.

I am trying to rewrite code while faulty programs are still running in my mind. They call that earned secure attachment. Earned. Like it's something we can build with our hands, brick by brick from therapy sessions and relationships and community and hydration. Every moment where someone stays and our nervous systems go Oh. They stayed. File that. That's new data.

I will wake up tomorrow, like I have every morning of my life so far, and take inventory once more. Fingers. Knees. Spine. Stomach. Purpose. 

I'll fill the bowls and make the coffee, run the errands and open the tabs. I'll do enough to survive another day of proving my worth to the ghost of a little girl who was taught, before she had words, that her existence was an inconvenience.